The mod hall of shame. (Someone took an industrial solder iron to a wii.)

I bought 10 batteries with the contacts off ebay cheaper than I could have picked up 10 of them from the corner market.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/131346398476?_trksid=p2059210.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT (10 tabbed for 7.99 free shipping)

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Energizer-2032BP-4-Energizer-Lithium-2032-4pk/37300766 (4 pack for 7.18)

 

I got a Turboexpress cheap off eBay. It was in very nice shape cosmetically and the seller described it as not working, doesn't power up. I expected the usual, bad caps and blown fuse. What I saw when I opened made it obvious it was due to amateurish hack job.

Firtst it looks like someone used a cheap no name soldering iron to try and recap the Turboexpress and had limited soldering experience. A lot of the solder pads for the caps were damaged and there were a few other glaring noob mistakes like using pea-sized solder blob to hold down leads. What's worse, most of the caps don't have brand marking so I may end up replacing them all anyway,



about 1/4 inch of exposed wire touching metal box and a diode. It's probably what blew the fuse. Also notice brown spot on the white wires, I guess high powered soldering iron?



2 missing caps and melted audio out jack. One of the cap spot has no pads at all oh why can't there be schematic of Turboexpress??? There's one for TG-16 but the parts number are different.



Top cap, the negative lead held down by pea sized blob and not connected to anything. The pad had lifted and it wasn't any good floating there. Bottom cap had long exposed lead touching a metal spot on the board.



And completely left 2 old caps untouched. These 2 are connected to video. I was going to mod this one for a new LCD and recap but with this butcher job, I doubt it is safe to alter any further!! Replacing that 2 caps and keeping original LCD is probably safer for me.

These hack jobs only reinforces the need to be licensed to use a soldering iron. Just because you know where to buy a $10 50-watts iron and know how to plug it in is not good enough, one also needs a few hundred hours of soldering and desoldering experience to recap Turboexpress.

 

Just found this guy, who had been soldering a nand-reader to his 360, on the team xecuter forum.
I wonder why it didn't work...

 

Agh! My eyes! He's completely obliterated the J1D2 header. That poor xbox. Maybe his soldering iron died and all he had lying around was a blow torch.

 

Probably used something overpowered like that 180w iron: http://www.harborfreight.com/180-watt-industrial-soldering-gun-60765.html

Or used a blow torch for plumber to solder pipes.

The botherboard's fried (literally)

 

The image would not load for me. I so wanted to see what it looked like.

 

I pulled this AV "board" out of a model 1 Sega Genesis.

 

Looks like drakons work

 

http://imgur.com/a/Xf1On

I managed to get this all removed and fixed a few traces. Got it bootable and JTAG'ed, but it was looking pretty dire...

 

jesus christ ! and i dont even believe in him !

 

Is JTAG the equivalent of TSOP mod on the original Xbox?

 

I have only been soldering for a few years.. And some of these pics are scary.. guess some ppl don't know what flux is hehe.....

OH my eyes That poor header ..... What was he using a blow torch to solder with?

 

This thread gave me confidence! hehe I never thought of myself as great, but I can fix most things I own. Seeing this tells me I'm not so bad. I use to be a professional welder (steel structures) and I worked in the plating industry (aerospace) for a while, so I know a bit about metal bonding, fusion and the likes.

How those people don't recognize their mistakes? I did some mistakes in the past, but I learned from them.

 

^ same people who thinks buying meat from store is better because it's not killing animal.